Behavior analysts collaborating within interdisciplinary teams are likely to find themselves at difficult crossroads. Some of these crossroads include implementing alternative treatments, defining and determining risk and harm, and evaluating research and interventions. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of these crossroads and provide…

The language of behavior analysis is precise in the sense that it focuses attention on functional relations between behavior and the environment that are extended in time. However, to non-behavior analysts, behavior-analytic terms and explanations are difficult to understand and awkward sounding. Evidence suggests that this has had deleterious…

The Scientist Practitioner model is a universal approach towards the education and preparation of doctoral students in psychology in general and behavior analysis in particular. Components of such an approach include a grounding in an empirical and scientific worldview, an investigatory approach towards the study of human behavior, training in…

Researchers, teachers, practitioners, and parents are often concerned with how to program for and achieve the maintenance of appropriate behavior. The unintended maintenance of problem behavior is less often evaluated. This article describes a behavioral phenomenon, resurgence, that may result in the unintended maintenance of problem behavior.…

Ole Ivar Lovaas (1927-2010) is known worldwide for his research within the field of Applied Behavior Analysis, and is probably the most influential researcher within the field of treatment of children with autism. In the first part of this biographically oriented paper, we inform the readers about his family background, childhood, elementary and…

As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs. The BIAS…

The review will focus on the effectiveness of school-based "self-management" (SM) interventions--a widely-used cognitive behavioral intervention to address disruptive and challenging behaviors in school settings. Though SM interventions are referred by many names (e.g., self-control, effortful control, self-regulation), SM is defined as…

From the beginning of time, there has been a pervasive interest in getting some members of the human race to conform to the wishes of other members of the human race. The use of positive as well as not so positive methods have been utilized, researched and espoused upon. The current paper presents a review of the vast literature on the history of…

Functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP) provides a behavioral analysis of the psychotherapy relationship that directly applies basic research findings to outpatient psychotherapy settings. Specifically, FAP suggests that a therapist's in vivo (i.e., in-session) contingent responding to targeted client behaviors, particularly positive reinforcement…

Constraint-induced (CI) therapy is a term given to a family of efficacious neurorehabilitation treatments including to date: upper extremity CI movement therapy, lower extremity CI movement therapy, pediatric CI therapy, and CI aphasia therapy. The purpose of this article is to outline the behavior analysis origins of CI therapy and the ways in…

Behaviorally-designed educational programs are often based on a research tradition that is not widely understood by potential users of the programs. Though the data may be sound and the prediction of outcomes for individual learners quite good, those advocating adoption of behaviorally-designed educational programs may need to do more in order to…

The delivery of food contingent on 10 s of consecutive toy engagement resulted in a decrease in engagement and a corresponding increase in other responses that had been previously reinforced with food. Similar effects were not observed when tokens exchangeable for the same food were delivered, suggesting that engagement was disrupted by the…

Psychology texts often cite the work of Marian and Keller Breland and their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), to demonstrate operant conditioning and the "misbehavior of organisms" from an evolutionary perspective. Now available on the Internet at the official IQ Zoo website (http://www3.uca.edu/iqzoo/), the artifacts of ABE's work, in…

The topic of stimulus control is too broad and complex to be traceable here. It would probably take a two-semester course to cover just the highlights of that field's evolution. The more restricted topic of equivalence relations has itself become so broad that even an introductory summary requires more time than we have available. An examination…

In addressing positive general education teaching practices for use with students with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), the chapter emphasizes teacher behavior change research that has been informed by applied behavior analytic (ABA) principles. Its central theme is that general education teachers can access research…